Night Doctor Surgery

From Edge of Darkness Wiki

Effect:The Night Doctors have developed surgical techniques that speed Kindred healing. Although a vampiric body can’t repair itself without the use of Vitae, Night Doctor Surgery can make the job easier, and therefore more efficient.

Performing an operation with this Merit requires access to a fully modern operating room and cutting- edge tools. Due to the extreme difficulty of the techniques, tools give no bonus. They simply make resetting broken bones, stitching together tissue, reconnecting blood vessels and realigning nerves possible, all of which is necessary to ease the effort of the Vitae. In extreme cases, such as severe burns, skin grafts from other parts of the body are employed.

The player of the character performing the surgery makes an extended Intelligence + Medicine roll, with each roll representing an hour of surgery. The doctor needs to achieve a number of successes equal to the number of Health points of damage the patient has suffered (from whatever kind of damage). Once those successes are amassed, the patient has been stabilized. The player then makes one final roll, again representing an hour of surgery. Each success on that final roll turns one point of lethal damage into one point of bashing damage. Alternately, two successes on that final roll can be spent to turn one point of aggravated damage into two points of lethal damage.

Example: Monica has suffered two points of aggravated damage on her arms, but is otherwise unharmed. She goes to see Dr. M for surgery. His Intelligence + Medicine pool is five dice, and he needs two successes to stabilize her. He does it on his first two rolls, so after two hours of surgery he’s ready to really attack the problem and start reconstructing her mangled limbs. He rolls again, and this time gets two successes. This turns one of her points of aggravated damage into two points of lethal damage. If he’d gotten four successes, both points of her aggravated damage would turn into four points of lethal damage. Had he failed his roll, the damage would remain.

It should be noted that many forms of anesthesia don’t work on Kindred. Those that do generally require the patient to use the Blush of Life effect to deliberately absorb them. Since Kindred who are willing to undergo surgery are often short of Vitae, this can be a problem. Various solutions have been used, from staking (which has the drawback of inflicting more damage, but which at least keeps the patient still) to Dominate to simply strapping the

patient down and stuffing a gag in his mouth.

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